Author Archives: Rusty Rueff

About Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff, author of purposed worKING. Rusty Rueff is the former Chairman Emeritus of The GRAMMY Foundation in Los Angeles. He most recently completed the successful 16 month leadership role as Coordinating National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O) for the reelection of President Obama and ten-years of Board service and President of the Board of Trustees of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Corporately, most recently Rueff was the Chief Executive Officer at SNOCAP, Inc. until the acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April 2008. Before joining SNOCAP in 2005, he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) from 1998 until 2005. He was also with the PepsiCo companies for more than ten years, with the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies for two years, and in commercial radio as an on-air personality for six years. Rusty holds an M.S. in counseling and a B.A. in radio and television from Purdue University. In 2003 he was named a distinguished Purdue alumnus, and he and his wife, Patti, are the named benefactors of Purdue’s Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts. He is a corporate director of Glassdoor.com and runcoach. He is the co-founder and Executive Committee Member of T4A.org, serves on the Founding Circle of The Centrist Project and a founding Board Member of The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition. He is also the co-author of the book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. Rusty and his wife, Patti, reside in Hillsborough, CA and Charlestown, R.I.

day 439: “How Much Longer?”

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The kids in the back of the car on the long trip all say the same thing like it is instinctively imprinted in their being; “How much longer?” With one more child, there is a harmony of whining in the background. It almost makes you not want to take the trip. This sometimes is a good metaphor for what happens at work. I once had a guy who worked for me who was so sure that he was ready to take on more that he began to challenge me as a manager and leader saying that I was holding him back and I wasn’t able to recognize talent when I saw it. I’m an easy going guy when it comes to these things so I open myself up for criticism on purpose to get better, but even I was a little taken back with the challenges that I didn’t know how to spot, cultivate and develop talent. It was a 20 year career of mine after all. But I digress. My answer to the challenge from this very bright, very talented and very ambitious young man was that he will be ready, when I say that he is ready as I not only have responsibility for his success, I also have responsibility for his failure. We had many long and difficult discussions after that and I thought I was going to lose him a few times. But once he understood that I was also about not letting him fail, which meant that I was guaranteeing his success, he calmed down and let me pace him. We get so impatient in our jobs. Maybe we bore too quickly, or maybe all of the organizational cues and signs are so about quick movement up the ladder that we don’t realize that the growth is in the process and the journey, not in the job title or rank within the company. I am so glad that Jesus didn’t take the immature approach. Jesus had patience and perseverance that only He could have, which is such a great model for each of us. At one point Jesus said, which meant he knew this to be true, as quoted in Matthew 28:18, that “I have been given complete authority in heaven and on earth.” The cool thing about this statement is that Jesus didn’t tell this to His disciples until after He had been raised from the dead and fulfilled all of the prophesies and scriptures from the past. How easy it would have been for Him to have said this at any time of His life, being that He was God. He could have crowned Himself a child King and been like King Tut who ruled Egypt at nine years old. But, had Jesus done that He would have not gone the whole way and finished the mission He was given by His Father. In the Garden of Galilee He asked God if the cup of suffering could be taken from Him, but only if it was God’s will for it to be so. As you know, I don’t profess to be a Biblical scholar. I’m just a business guy who feels called to write this blog, but I hear in those words from Jesus a little bit of a son asking his Father, “How much longer?”. I think Jesus is showing us in the example of His life that He was like us and his human part had some impatience and some unwillingness to take the hard road forward. But, the part that was God is what we must strive for and know that the answer to “How much longer?”, is “As long as God wants it to be”. Let us each take this lesson into our jobs and our careers and maybe we can stop worrying about how much longer it will be.

Reference: Matthew 26:39 and Matthew 28:18 (New Living Testament)